Numbers or Lore? Soccer and Statistics in the U.S.

I was recently asked by ESPN the Magazine writer Chris Sprow whether I paid much attention to statistics in football. My answer was pretty abrupt, and didn’t exactly highlight me as a scholar of the statistical side of the game. “I honestly hardly ever look at stats,” I told him, and he quoted me with that in this look at statistics and the appeal of soccer in the States.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether I look at statistics or not. I loved soccer before I knew what a statistic even was. But interestingly, Sprow believes that the dearth of popular usage of statistics in soccer relative to the way baseball or basketball can be broken down limits the appeal of the game to the American fan.

But if soccer could ever aspire to gain the cultural hold on America that it desires — this from a former college player who watches a ton of soccer and plays to this day — the solution is easy: Give us more numbers. Make ’em the type we can really use.

Is this true, that American sports fans need more numbers to get a grip on soccer?

I see the importance of numbers in American sports culture. It permeates almost every discussion on baseball, and fantasy sports are a phenomenon unto themselves; undeniably addictive, with your average office worker spending more time crunching numbers for their fantasy team than on the spreadsheets they’re being paid to work on. Serious baseball fans purchase Baseball Prospectus every year, and immerse themselves in the minutiae of PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm).

But is the lack of the same common analysis of soccer a serious factor in the sport’s failure to gain a stronger cultural foothold in the States? (Of course, there is considerable statistical analysis of soccer, but it has no way near the grip on popular discussion of the sport that numbers do in America’s big three sports)

I’d suggest that the common experience of any American sports fan was the same as mine growing up in England: that the love of the sport came from watching and playing the game myself from an early age, and being able to relate that to the surrounding culture of the sport (in my case soccer). The love of the game comes before the love of statistics. How that is nurtured and ensures that initial play turns into a lifetime of addiction to the sport has an awful lot more to do with the cultural romance of the game than the available numbers to crunch, I’d suggest. The numbers come later and become important (and some numbers come to have an almost mystical appeal that goes beyond the mere statistic), but they are an ancillary part of the whole experience.

I don’t remember seeing Kevin Costner crunching numbers in a Field of Dreams.

“People will come, Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn into the driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. ‘Of course we won’t mind if you have a look around,’ you’ll say. ‘It’s only twenty dollars per person.’ They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it; for it is money they have, and peace they lack.

“They’ll walk up to the bleachers and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they had dipped themselves in magic waters; the memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.

“People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers; it has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and raised again. Baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again. Oh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”

– Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams (1989)

Isn’t the appeal of any sport, at the heart of it, down to its romance, history and drama in a given culture’s shared memory banks?

Perhaps confusingly, in today’s globalising sports culture, I’d suggest this is one reason so many American soccer fans disdain MLS and prefer to support British teams: attaching oneself to the evident 100 year plus heritage of Liverpool FC, even from thousands of miles away, has more appeal to many than the meaningless franchise of Red Bull New York, renamed after a sugared soft drink in the very recent past. But this growing knowledge of the global game is the starting point for a stronger attachment to soccer in the U.S., and a few MLS teams have figured out how to tap into this enthusiasm locally.

What America needs to love soccer like the rest of the world isn’t more numbers: it’s more lore. What is needed is a cultural inheritance of the sport, so kids that play soccer have a broader popular and historical sense of the game’s significance to attach their love of kicking a ball to, just as American kids have traditionally attached their love of hitting a ball with a stick to baseball’s storied lore.

I think you are correct, that what American needs to appreciate soccer more is lore and cultural inheritance. But you have to remember that just about every european football club is still an association in one form or another. I am not sure whether the American franchise system works as well in that respect, and i also think that that is why college football is so hugely popular for example. Many college teams has a cultural inheritance and a history few franchise teams can match.

I think soccer is impossible to gauge with regards to statistics. The coach of the Norwegian National Team tried to break down the game in numbers in the early 90’s by analyzing international games, and one of his discoveries was that teams who have the goal kick are more likely to concede a goal than their opposition.

Anyway, i appreciate reading your blog, keep up the good work.

Lars, Oslo, Norway. – Vålerenga IF

June 9, 2009 at 11:52 amJoe Westhead

Is it not that American sports fans use stats because that’s what the experts use? They don’t care for statistics, they care for the story they tell.

If an American coach or a journalist uses a statistic to further a point, a fan will use it as a takeaway.

European soccer fans would never ordinarily hear of such stats, and are hardly likely to go search for them (this thread notwithstanding: ).

It’s not surprising that the rare occasions European fans do hear of stats, they will often use them: winning streaks, goals per game, minutes without conceding, years since John Jensen scored.

Lars, I that’s a very valid point about college football and about the franchise system. Certain pro American sports teams are pretty much untouchable now in terms of moving their location significantly, and it’s no surprise those are the ones with the most support both locally and nationwide. Only a couple of MLS teams are close to being unthinkable in terms of franchising elsewhere — DC United are on the cusp right now, and they’re the team with the longest and strongest tradition in the league.

In terms of statistical analysis of the game itself, I have a follow-up post coming on that. I think it’s very interesting to look at how some teams have attempted to apply American “Moneyball” analysis to soccer so far. I’m not sure all of them have really understood the principle behind it.

June 9, 2009 at 12:03 pmCoz

It’s not *the* reason, but I’ve always argued that the lack of stats is *a* reason why the game isn’t bigger in the States. There was an episode of “The X-Files,” of all things, where Mulder talked about how you can reconstruct an entire baseball game from the box score. And the proliferation of rotisserie and fantasy leagues — in baseball and football — is another piece of evidence in that direction.

My master list of reasons, by the way, is as follows:

1. We didn’t invent it
2. We’re not the best in the world at it
3. It’s not conducive to traditional sports television/advertising models
4. Not enough statistics
5. The myth that it is/should be a “participatory” sport at the youth level

Hmmm. I used to have seven, and I may have just made #5 up. Maybe I split #3 into two.

June 9, 2009 at 12:12 pmJoe Westhead

Yeah, I think football could do with more nerd-fans writing and commenting on the minutiae of the game. We can but hope.

Joe, I do agree it’s the story connect to a statistic that matters the most (see the mythical status of certain baseball home run numbers). But in baseball, it’s also interesting that fans have driven much of the increasing focus on more and more convoluted (but brilliantly informative) statistics in recent years. Much of it came from the culture of grassroots baseball board games and fantasy baseball, from the work of a fan-writer like Bill James and those that built Baseball Prospectus.

From bottom-up, these fan-nerds helped revolutionise which statistics were used to analyse baseball performance (much helped also by the book Moneyball) by the media and the coaches: they had a broad base of popular usage before ESPN even began including them in their broadcasts. Quite an interesting cultural phenomenon in itself that might to some degree negate the point I make above, perhaps?

June 10, 2009 at 4:27 amJK

Great article. Its interesting though that in the UK we are tying more to create these stats and show things with them. Recently Opta produced a report on Gareth Barry showing goals, assists, crosses and key passes which all showed him to be an average player compared with other’s in those categories. However where as in some sports you have players for attack, for defence as a midfield what it showed really was Barrys game was more all round than say a Robinho etc. Some times its ok having the stats but its the context of them that is the key.

June 10, 2009 at 8:39 amDaniel

Just anecdotally, the extraordinarily deep statistical side to baseball is part of what has been drawing me deeper and deeper in to the sport recently (moving from a football-only obsessive toward someone with something to follow other than the Silly Season every summer…). The fact that so much rational, evidence- based argument can be had about baseball is a really enjoyable break from the extraordinary subjective debate/discussion surrounding soccer. And while the game’s history definitely is a nice side dish to all of this appealing statistical minutiae, it is really pretty hard to connect back to the game’s history. The inaccessibility, in my experience is two-fold: MLB’s uptight policy about YouTube means classic moments in the sport’s history are hard to find and experience for one’s self, and baseball modernization/commercialization/capitalization is at a far more advanced stage than the Premierships, meaning money has been drawing away something of the soul of the game for a long time now, both in terms of the expensive luxury and post-season seats pricing out many of the most passionate fans into the far reaches of the stadium, and also, relatedly, in terms of the stadiums themselves. After Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, no ballpark in the Major Leagues is older than 1960, and many are far newer. This is, unfortunately, even true in the minor leagues, where one might hope to find that “lost purity” of the game; unfortunately, it’s not so, and parks still in use that were built before 1990 are extremely rare.

June 10, 2009 at 3:37 pmAndrew

“I don’t remember seeing Kevin Costner crunching numbers in a Field of Dreams.”

Honestly this is why Bull Durham is a much better baseball film.

June 25, 2010 at 4:14 pmAaron

Nice piece. And no, stats aren’t the issue here, there are a whole lot of other cultural reasons why we don’t like football that have to do with the style of the game and how we view our place in the world.

A personal side not here though… the “Red Bull” is just horrendous. I’m originally a New Englander who has been on the road for about 10 yrs and just settled in NYC and I wanted to support a team here. I hate American football and I bleed green, red, and yellow/black so the logical choice for me is soccer since I have no connection to the Revolution so why not support the Red Bull?

Why? because they’re called “Red Bull”! How can I possibly support a team who is named after such a d.b. drink? Think about the guy who orders a red bull drink at a bar. Do I want to support a team named for that? I know that Red Bull actually owns the team, but seriously can’t they just name it FCNY (a nice play on FDNY or NYPD) and then just have the red bull logo plastered on everything? It’s common in football to see logos everywhere, but why do we literally have to name the team for such a ridiculous sugary drink.

So, I’m left without a team here. Seriously, I might pack up and move just so I can support a local team.

June 29, 2010 at 7:07 amSPA2TACU5

I still have a NY/NJ Metrostars jersey in my collection. I think it’s from 1999 when I was in NYC and Boston (also went to see the NE Revolution play against… Dallas? NE Revs had Edwin ‘Merlin’ Gorter and Richard Goulooze 🙂

I also used to play Yahoo’s MLS Fantasy Soccer League. Knowing nothing about the MLS and it’s players except for the foreign ones like Gorter and Goulooze.

I remember Ante Razov, Carlos Bocanegra, Chris Klein, Josh Wolff, Lubos Kubik, Jason Kreis, Gutierrez, Kevin Hartman, Greg Vanney, and Peter Vagenas (because of his name). I had never seen any of them play. Not in a stadium, not on tv.

One of the first players I picked was a guy called Clint Mathis. But at that moment not because of his stats, but because his name had a good ring to it.
At that point Clint Mathis was not a big star yet. He turned out the be a great player for my team and I never took him out.
Purely based on how he did for my Fantasy team I predicted Clint would make it into the USMNT and for a couple of years I was hoping my favorite local Dutch club (Sparta Rotterdam) would sign him. Eventually he made it to the USMNT and he became unaffordable.

But apart from that I don’t believe stats can capture the full performance of a soccer player. But I do love stats in soccer.

In 1998 during the World Cup in France me and my brother would both pick two players each per game who we would “follow”. We’d note down whether they made a good or a bad pass, if the pass went forward or backward, and if they would win or lose a ball (rebound, tackle, etc.).

We started doing so to prove Clarence Seedorf’s performances in the Dutch team were horribly bad. In the years before -pretty much since his move to Real Madrid in ’96- we had noticed Seedorf as had become quite lazy and would only play on the ball. Not doing any defensive work while losing a lot of possession of the ball.

Although everyone in Europe thought he was a world class talent who played incredibly well and the Dutch media praising him time and again, our stats showed in nearly every game he lost possession at least on 40% of his passes and he would never try to capture possession. Also he would never try to win a header.

Years later the media and coaches starting noticing, but for many years people didn’t understand that his club performances were so good because he played in a different position with the midfield supporting his lack of defensive work.

August 26, 2010 at 2:52 pmmyles

very interesting read, but there is one group of people who have used statistics in soccer effectively and its not mentioned at all in the write up. Sports bettors

There are a couple good sites (and many bad sites) that have you used to stats to help betting. One experiment was actually fairly accurate in predicting the occurrence of draws.

The point about counter attacks is a good point but there are formulas that take this into account. {Problem is these forumlas are very complicated for the average reader, myself included

Anyways if anyone knows about the importance of statisitics in soccer its pro bettors